


Pretend

by viennakangaroo (orphan_account)



Category: Hetalia: Axis Powers
Genre: Gen, Human AU, Murder, gender neutral reader, ghost au, this has been on deviantART for ages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-01
Updated: 2018-08-01
Packaged: 2019-06-20 01:51:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 9,849
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15523449
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/viennakangaroo
Summary: "There's nothing," he goes on, nearly humorous, "that's so taunting as possibility. When was the last time something went wrong for you, and you didn't wish there was some other way? See. It's very black and white, in the end.""All my worries stem from you. Give me a reason to be patient."Intrigue enters his otherwise peculiar expression. "Soon enough, even I might start to seem good company."





	1. Chapter 1

It’s a Wednesday night, and the moment when you see him for the first time is when he’s stepping out of his body. Although perhaps it's the beginning of something, for all you know at the time, you may as well have forgotten yourself; you’ve never been a drinker, but when he looks at you, you wonder if you may as well start.   
  
Of course, you can’t  _do_  anything to help him, now – you can’t rush into oblivion after the murderer, or pull the dead from the grave. There’s no course of action open to you, nor are you inclined to change that. It’s strenuous enough, already, to  _think_ : he’s gone, his shell of a body can’t be more than twenty metres away, and no one, either living or dead, has ever made you so afraid in a  _glance_.  
  
You haven’t even touched him. Your hands haven’t gone anywhere near but he’s dead, and yet far too alive for your liking. You could almost believe it's all an illusion, if you didn’t know better (your hand feels hot and wet against your ear, as though it was  _your_  hand on the gun at point blank range; the police are saying things on the other end of the line which you can't begin to comprehend). Responding is out of the question, but at least you manage something along the way, pretending to be coherent, pretending not to be inexplicably unknown to yourself and to the world around you.   
  
And this ghost, this spectre, doesn’t give a damn about you, if his distraction, his refusal to approach you directly is anything to go by. Perhaps it’s a repercussion for how you’ve almost entirely ignored the shredded state of his eyes, and the darkened temple. But he hasn’t stopped  _moving about_ , either; he doesn’t even seem necessarily  _disheartened._ Rather, he appears to treat his own untimely death as some sort of insubstantial barrier. Halting in the middle of the road, he studies the street-water gushing through the soles of his shoes; he watches his keys fall clean down through his hand when he picks them up. He tries again, and again. He acts first disappointed, then  _livid_ , only to smooth it all over again and apparently reconstruct his entire emotional state, because the tightness around his paling lips disappears.   
  
Heart in your throat, you watch him turn and leave you behind.  
  
By the time the call’s ended you’re shaking all over; somewhere along the line you’ve begun clutching at your coat, the walls of the nearest building to your left, anything which is verifiable enough and  _real_  enough to serve as an anchor. It’s impossible now as much as ever to know much about the dead, but you don’t fancy your chances against someone who approaches his demise like an inconvenience.  
  
You’ll forget by tomorrow, you convince yourself, after much deliberation. It’ll all fix itself, and everything will resume as it was before, no phantoms behind your eyes. It feels like it should be someone else’s concern, besides; it’s someone else’s task to scrape the gore up from the road and see where the bullet lodged in the corpse that remains behind.  
  
For now, you’ve got a simpler objective on your mind: you have to stop thinking about the intangible, the soul now drifting around London. But your fear is mingling with your anger; you didn't want to see him die. You didn't want to see  _him_ , either. Does  _his_  reality peel away in front of him? Does he have any sense of what you've witnessed?  
  
You don’t think he does, and you’ve never been more terrified in your life.  
  
\--  
  
The first bar you try is closed, and after being almost certain it’s  _his_  face behind the tables, you give up trying. You’ve no urge to lose control of yourself, or to cry, to succumb to whatever feeling lingers either in your throat or your imagination, and you won't let it happen if you can help it.  
  
At the next bar you wind up with a glass of water. It’s not the worst thing in the world; it seems to purify your hands, and it eases your throat; it reminds you you’re capable of performing basic human functions, and that’s not something worth forsaking. The bartender, bored out of her mind, grants you her mojito recipe without you asking for it, wrinkling her nose when an ashtray is spilled outside and the culprit scurries off. You wonder whether the ghost smoked ( _smokes_ ), too, and hate the idea.  
  
Once done you apologise needlessly to her, and feel grateful she isn’t the woman who fired the gun two hours before. When you hail a taxi in the rain you try to forget the oily, darkened quality which the water’s taken on, and passionately resent yourself for paying more attention to the driver’s resemblance to your ghost than his good-natured inquiries. It works well enough at first, moreover; it’s working well, because when your apartment door slams shut you don’t hear the gunshot reverberating back at you – only the door. You wash the city’s feel from your hands and see water, not blood. You relish it - relish your own sanity. Pity you’re already certain you won’t be sleeping.  
  
Whether you deserve it or not, this is the end of something. You'll never be the same again. You find him waiting at the edge of your bed, dragging patterns against the sheets with his nails. You swear you look  _more_ exhausted than he does.  
  
“Wasn’t it enough?” you ask him, genuinely startled by your own courage. "It  _was_  a good shot. I saw it go through you. It should've killed you."  
  
“Depends how you define kill,” he answers, partly drowned out by the rain your windows can't quite shut out. His voice would be normal-sounding, perhaps even pleasant, if you able to stop thinking about how it’s possible at  _all_ for him to be speaking to you, and for it to ring so clear, or for every part of his body to still be dry.   
  
Some part of you that’s not caught up in the panic, the crawling sensation under your skin, is attentive; it wants to go on, to find out more about whatever finer details now concern your present and your future. Here’s an opportunity to know someone who could already be a part of you, without your knowledge (and it’s  _horrible_ , but it’s the best you can come up with).  
  
The least you can do is try not to look him in the face, and hope for the best. You nod at the sink in the room over. “I’d offer you a drink but I guess you don’t need it.”  
  
“You don’t have to offer me anything. I’m only here because I don’t have a choice," he says. The edges of his eyelids and nostrils are burnt. You watch him cross his legs, still not risen from your bed, and for whatever reason, you can’t help but feel affronted.   
  
"What do you want?"  
  
"Company. An explanation. I saw you there. I know you were the only witness."  
  
" _Company_?"  
  
"If this is how I have to look for however long eternity is, I want  _someone_ to talk to."  
  
“How did you find me?”  
  
“I wasn’t trying to hide. I was with you the whole time.”  
  
“You’re a ghost," you say. "You aren't even real."  
  
“God, could you not? I'm not that different from you," comes the answer, far more potent,  _heavier_ than you thought it'd be. He's nothing more or less than a wraith to you so it hasn't entered your thoughts he could feel like you do.   
  
Thing is, you’re quite certain you’d cope with an amiable spirit. The threat of  _his_ longevity is what chills you to your core, so much so that once again you're shuddering, and you can't reconcile how on earth you refused to drink something that'd make all of this easier to digest.  
  
“So what am I meant to call you?" you say after a time, pausing at the bookshelf; from the corners of your eyes you see moths darting from the side table lamp through his neck and then back again.  
  
“Arthur is fine. But I’d rather not stick around, so don't get familiar.”  
  
You balk. “I don't  _want_ you." When the words leave your mouth, you enjoy a sense of pleasure at your own hostility, although that alone is a development, regardless of whether or not it's a more appropriate mindset than anything else you've tried. "You’re a stranger. Why don’t you go find your family, for God's sake?"  
  
Bristling, he drops his foot back to the floor. "They didn't see me killed. They can't see me, not like you can. This is a last resort."  
  
"So why, again, are you here?" you ask. "I'm sorry to tell you I won't be much help in the long run, but I thought you'd figured it out." For an instant, fleeting as ever, you imagine yourself in his place: utterly unaltered in every regard except for an unfortunate headwound, and the inability to be known and appreciated. You wonder whether you’d be the same.   
  
As he gets up and begins to pace you keep your eyes on his collarbone. "Interest - maybe a stupid kind of hope. Either way I couldn't control it, and I wasn't about to try," he concedes. "I hardly know what to feel. I thought perhaps you'd be able to enlighten me."  
  
"If you're still as human as you claim, why come here? Didn't anyone teach you basic etiquette?"  
  
There's a pause during which the temperature drops even further than it already has.  
  
"Being dead doesn't mean you stop wanting company. I wasn't about to go up to every person I found and wave my hands in front of them until they paid me mind."  
  
“I’m sorry. Well, I think I am, but I don’t know.”  
  
“Don’t you count yourself lucky, then? You’re one in a million, like some sort of... lottery, I suppose. How wonderful."  
  
“I shouldn’t have seen  _anything_.”  
  
“I know. It wasn’t on my agenda to get murdered in my twenties, either.”  
  
“I only learned your name a minute ago—”  
  
“—I didn't exactly look down at myself after the shot and feel  _relieved_  I wasn’t in a better place—”  
  
“—even know who the hell you—"  
  
“I thought we’d done names," he says, exasperated, circling the crevices of his eyes. In turn, you're granted a feeling of violent nausea, no room left for personal hurt.   
  
“Arthur, I don’t  _want_  to know you. I never would have.”  
  
“I never said you had to be my  _friend_ ," continues the ghost crisply, pausing to wipe dust off the blinds with his thumb, apparently having mastered in that short space of time the ability to control whether he touches things or not. "But there has to be some sort of reason, doesn’t there? You don’t come out of that sort of thing technically dead, and not wonder why only  _one_ person can see you. And I’m not exactly thrilled, either, so let’s both stop pretending this is a simple mess." Sniffing, he rubs the dust from the spaces between his fingers. "I'm human, you're human; let's work it out."  
  
“You’re a ghost."  
  
“I’m human,” he reiterates, voice stiffened, and extends a hand. “Go on, touch me. Same as ever.”  
  
“I don’t—"  
  
“Isn’t it solid?”  
  
"No, it isn't. Stop this. I don't want you here. You’re cold.”  
  
He returns your animosity with a touch of condescension you're powerless to repel; if you didn't want so badly to cry, to  _scream_  from the panic of disruption alone, you'd admire his fortitude. “I hardly wanted to be here."  
  
"So you say, but you were singing a different tune a minute ago."  
  
Eyes unmoving, you don't glance upward until you're sure he's gone, still twisting your watch about your wrist. It's easy to tell when you're alone once more: the entire atmosphere lifts, heats up like you've pulled back the blinds. Whereas you before felt confined, as though within a crucible, you feel something else now, something like the sensation of stepping into a vacant room. You can't possibly appreciate hearing another voice between these walls, given how hollow, how echoing, how  _stale_  it was. Whether you'll see him again or not is utterly beyond your control.  
  
As you sit awake, alternating continually between shivering and endlessly analysing the corner of the room he preoccupied, it occurs to you that he might  _never_ come back. Problem is that your emotions feel so curiously muted since those hours ago that it's now harder than ever to tell if that troubles you or not.  
  
Within an hour, you can't think of him without the same aching, repetitive impulse jolting your brain, sending your heart racing, and it doesn't go away.  
  
\--  
  
Things turn out far less favourably than you hoped. He's right: you don't sleep, and when you do, it's only to wake again hours later with a horrific, hurling motion. After you've thrown up and drunk as much water as you can stand, you stagger back to the sheets, swaying and frail. For a time you want only to massage your throat; it's so raw you think it'll end you before he does.   
  
As you turn off the light you think of blood on concrete, and the stench his death carried.  
  
\--  
  
You're almost startled to find your own face as you remember it the next morning, without the gaping crevices of the phantom's own. Can they even heal, now he's dead? You consider it, but it doesn't seem plausible. Not even eternity could mend those sorts of dents, at least not in a hurry.  
  
Breakfast barely slips its way into your schedule, but you manage to get a bit down, at the very minimum, and try to ponder eternity in the meanwhile. Almost mechanically, you change schedule, change it to something appropriate to your harrowed mindset; you hurry past the newsagent and you spend more money than usual on a bus route which avoids the public gardens. On the train, you discover that the fluorescent lights are the most fascinating things you've ever seen.  
  
Thankfully you see no one really resembles him, at least not in the parts of the city which are your regular haunt. His manner of speech, above all, is the sort which you are almost entirely able to avoid, making you grateful for his unusual qualities. Yet you cannot elude the phrase which seems to have attached itself to you ever since you caught a glimpse of the newspaper while on the train -  _big my secret_. By now, of course, your brush with death seems to have been stripped of anything which once defined it as yours. Now it's the world's possession, the tabloids' plaything, and you worsen the situation by refusing to identity yourself and participate in the investigation. The world will go on, and you'll know the truth is that it's as much your bloody endeavour as anyone else's.   
  
But nobody else will see Arthur's face in their own reflection; nobody else knows that ghosts are nailing themselves to the recesses of the minds which they inhabit. He's  _your_  ghost, he's  _your_ punishment.  
  
Every slip on the stairs, every dried-out scrap of conversation, every distracted show of mirth, comes right back to you and hence to him. He's everywhere - in your mind, your nerves, your emotions, your heart. No feeling can make itself known without him returning to your conscience. So does it occupy you that in the evening you very nearly smash a mug as the emotions surge, an unwelcome tide; you tremble as you return it to the cupboard and work on closing the windows, trying not to think about the correlation you inevitably end up making between the rain and his demise.   
  
Maybe you'll never listen to the rain again - maybe you don't have a need. Either way, you hardly care. You eat and work; you carry on as best you can.  _Big my secret, big my secret._ Are you, to him, the only human left alive? Are you all he has - does anyone else matter, if he doesn't to them?  
  
At nine o'clock at night, utterly unceremoniously, Arthur turns up. He peers with a sort of customary boredom over your shoulder, midway through your process of changing the footnotes on an overdue essay. A sort of comfortable silence - or one which, in the very least, pretends to be such - descends upon both of you until you notice that his reflection doesn't show up on the computer.   
  
"Didn't sleep, did you?" he says, as though with the authority to chide.  
  
He doesn't deserve a reply, you decide, at once resolute, readjusting your keyboard as well as the position of your shoulders. Once again imbued with the sense you've been plunged into some sort of vat,  _drowning_ , you inhale and run your fingers over the back of your other hand.  _What if_ —what if it had been you? What if you were the haunter? Would you be in his home, crying, alone and desperate? How often, indeed, does this happen? Is this  _always_ the case after death? In that instance, could this merely be the  _first time_  you've been chosen - a caretaker for the dead?  
  
Relevant or not, these considerations and more charge at you all at once, and your head falls into your hands. "Fuck off," you say. "Get out!" Repeating yourself is fruitless. He carries the uncanny ability to make himself  _impenetrable,_ untouchable _._  But you cannot be afraid of a person whose hands could not touch a knife if they tried. "Fuck off!" you yell, and to a witness you would appear mad; you're on the cusp of emotions which you aren't remotely prepared for, and haven't experienced properly in so, so long. in an instant you've removed yourself from it as best you can, closing in your head from every side. Anything more articulate begins at some point in a ramble, and ends in resentment.   
  
"Why—I don't get it, why are you looking at me like that? It's not that hard. Why is it so hard for you to understand I'm  _scared_ of you?"  
  
"I don't know what to tell you. You don't know what this is like for  _me_."  
  
"It's really not that hard," you tell him again, irate, with force; you don't have a moment to waste on his own feelings. "I'm doing my best to move on with a fucking  _ghost_ at my shoulder, and you're telling me you can't even try to imagine how I feel?"  
  
"I've spent the entire day looking for other options," he demurs sharply. "Do you still think I want to be here?"  
  
In all truth, you don't know what you've told yourself. All you  _do_ understand is that you want him gone, and for his momentary, terrifying plunge into dependence to cease here and now. "You bastard," you breathe out; you haven't even realised until now you've risen to your feet, grappling at every solid surface available. For an instant, you're practically reliving the murder: his appearance is the same, your stomach is a pit. It's almost surprising there isn't blood on your shoes. "You promised you wouldn't come back!"  
  
"No, I didn't. I said I was looking for other options; that was it," he answers, hands nearing his elbows as he studies your ceiling, though sightless. "It's actually  _surprising_ how soon you start wanting someone to talk to. I'm tired of walking through people, or burning them."  
  
"I'm not going to feel sorry for you."  
  
"I would've guessed as much. No matter. I think it's a mistake to start feeling too bad for each other."  
  
"Like you've tried!" A pause descends, during which the realisation of your own apprehension grows to dizzying. You have the urge to lie down, to process  _this_ , to process  _him_. "So when? When will you stop coming here?"  
  
"When I've sorted myself out. You can bear me a bit longer, can't you?"  
  
"I don't owe you anything."  
  
"Who's the one here who got shot?" And now, selfish as he is, he grows impassioned. "Just for a second, a split second of your time, I want you to think. I want you to stop focusing on the gunshot and my body and whatever else. As much as I resent it, you're just about all I fucking have. Hell, I'm going to admit it right now - I'm desperate. Just think about that. Do I want to come back here? No. Do I want to lose my head? No. It's a need, a human need I'm obliged to fulfill. That's all there is to it."  
  
You observe him withdraw, breathless, and question why you ever contemplated looking over the almost pockmarked lines of his face, the strings of skin yet to be cut away. This is an embodied nightmare of a man and he's a metre from you,  _human_  if not for the glaring irregularities of his flesh and translucence and confidence in his own righteousness.   
  
"There's nothing," he goes on, nearly humorous, "that's so taunting as possibility. When was the last time something went wrong for you, and you didn't wish there was some other way? See. It's very black and white, in the end."  
  
"All my worries stem from you. Give me a reason to be patient."  
  
Intrigue enters his otherwise peculiar expression. "Soon enough, even I might start to seem good company."  
  
Striving uselessly to separate your disbelief and your animosity, you end up clumsily speaking on the behalf of both, drained. "Are you proud of this? Are you somehow  _happy_  I can't sleep? I don't feel like the same person I was a week ago." Although you trail off you can tell he's got his reply waiting behind his teeth.  
  
"I'm not proud, I'm  _aware_. And I'm choosing to look after myself, first."  
  
"I don't want anything to do with you. I'm not going to tread carefully around you - I'm not going to play it safe." Circling about so as to place the furniture between you and him, you feel a painful desire for it all to have just been  _simpler_. "You couldn't touch me if you tried, but you've got the gall to call me  _lonely_!"  
  
"I do, because I know that if  _I_  feel lonely, soon enough, so will you."  
  
You lurch away from where Arthur's hand's fallen, near your side and glistening with dried blood, and feel grateful he's no more concrete than he is.  
  
"Leave me alone," you whisper, so tinny you're ashamed. " _Please_."  
  
He does, but once again, it doesn't make any difference. And  _knowing_ that - knowing what he's done to you, knowing these feelings and your anxiety may never depart, that he's resolved never to leave you alone permanently so long as it doesn't suit him - you may as well be dead, too.


	2. Chapter 2

At first you hardly notice it, but he only comes in the evenings. Silent, but judgemental; sightless, but all-knowing. You despise him for it - the only voice in months, and it has to be his! The only other flesh between the walls and it’s that which hardly seems to cling to him any longer (if a ghost can lose weight, he’s the perfect example). You think he goes through you on purpose, sometimes. There's no telling if he knows how long you remain awake at night, still, or how quickly you shut doors on dark rooms.  
  
Yet all the same, you manage to elude him most of the time, and him, you; what deeper motives he retains or acts upon are completely unknown, but when he won't even turn his head in the evenings and keeps his eye sockets aimed at the ceiling, you can't fool yourself into believing he thinks of you. What you continue to question, above all, is why he hasn't left; what can be the objective of investing in social situations if not to socialise? Why eat if not to be made full? If he can survive on such an utter lack of interaction, why linger in the company of a person who feels nothing but  _loathing_  for him?  
  
It doesn't take along until you close yourself off, wherever you go; there's no joy left in privacy  _or_  in company. You may as well exist in a permanent state of surveillance, caught on the edge of Airstrip One. His voice is as good as Victory gin; he has no hesitance in calling you awake in the mornings, if only to know you’re there. It doesn't help that he insists he's never  _there_  and you have no reason to stare over your dinner, waiting for his appearance, a worrier by trade.   
  
Unfortunately, the times he does make himself obvious are the ones where he's sullen, and persistent to the point of toppling you. His face is ashen; his hands are copper, glittering before your face, slipping back when you open your eyes. "Why did it have to be you?" he says one day, snarling, scratching at invisible streaks of dirt on your walls. His fingertips stab the plaster. "Anyone but you! One companion for eternity, and it had to be the one who saw me die!"  
  
Perhaps against your wish, you start to believe it - maybe the nail drives deeper each passing hour and you're the one trying to dig it out with a screwdriver. How many out there could do better than you? What sort of eternal companion are you, as it stands? Into what sort of world have you inducted him, a world which he would never have previously adopted as his own?  
  
"I don't know," you answer, anyway. You don't speak for days. Instead, you withdraw. Too much of Arthur, too long in his company, and you think he may as well be eating your conscience, pulling your life away from under you, extracting your soul out from under your skin.   
  
Escape becomes a craving, an insatiable  _need_ ; as dire as his supposed loneliness and self-absorption. What he demands, you deny; when you're not bowed by the feeling you're the one who's at fault, you try forgetting he exists at all. Plenty of room is left for nauseous, frantic deliberation, but it helps. After a week and a half, you don't feel bad for leaving without letting him know.  
  
You dare yourself to slip through your door and slip down to the streets and congratulate yourself for making it so far. For an instant, you're not turning around and always finding something there, waiting for you - a worst scenario made into an  _expectation_. You quicken your pace, you stretch your legs until they ache, you nearly choke on the thrum of your heart. It's so still, beautifully tranquil - you could be the only one in the world and, for once, it doesn't come with the knowledge a detached soul has chained himself to you. Even the short-lived may yet come to mean something to you, and for now it does—  
  
You're crossing the road, digging grit from under your nails while the streams of people around you thicken, when you're burned by a sudden chill - sharp enough to make your head fly back. His hand’s clasped over your skin, searing you like a hot iron. Almost transparent in daylight, you watch as four people rush through him.  
  
"Where are you going?" says Arthur shortly. “You didn't say anything."  
  
"Why the hell would I?" It's a miracle you aren't deterred by the glances thrown over over passing shoulders, shins which nearly bash against your own. Self-awareness comes slowly, and you make a move toward him; for the first time, the first moment, you feel the utter condemnation that comes with being the only one who can see him. Every aspect of the world about you is ticking forward and crushing the refuse. "You don't  _mean_  anything to me _."_  
  
"I can't help worrying about you."  
  
"I'm guessing you're trying to prove it," you gush on, near to gasping, lowly as you can, "but if you were telling the truth, you’d let me go." Still heaving under the weight of your revelation, you forget to ask how he can see you in the first place. You  _still_  aren’t sure.  
  
But here and now, you find the first sign of  _palpability_  - the place his savage touch leaves empty is red and shining, a burn that anyone could see for themselves if you showed them. A strange emotion fights to scramble up your throat, and you want to shout to the world that he's  _real_ , that here is the  _sign_  - but nothing you can do will make people see. Indeed, you half-believe it's  _this_  which destroys your resolve.  
  
You're starving, and you don't know what for.  
  
Leaving him behind, purposeful as you can be, you cradle your injury. Counting your steps, you loathe the spiralling clutter of your thoughts. You   _swear_ , in the space of a minute, to remake yourself, to be separate and exist fully of your own accord.   
  
But amidst the threats of inadequacy which have been cemented recently, you don't quite trust your chances; for the time being, what you have in the way of self-assurance has to suffice. Everything else must follow.  
\--  
  
By ten o'clock you're certain you'll never be speaking to another human being again. Three hours of struggling to get past what you've assumed is  _self-awareness_  has left you hollow - you're on the cusp of considering yourself unrecognisable. You never used to leave two hours before everyone else; you never used to trace your own paths back and forth until you forgot where they began. Somehow, you expect that the longer you walk, the swifter your chances grow of nearing the garden where Arthur was killed, which has only just ceased to be a crime scene.

It's almost  _amusing_  to consider, when you think of it in that light: recent news, another front-page discovery left to fester. You try laughing as you step over the gutter, with your eyes blurring (lucky for  _him_  - he'll find it easier to pretend when he’s cried, as nobody looks for shining eye sockets as soon as they look for the eyes themselves).   
  
Half-expecting to find him lingering behind the door or by your bed, you adjust to his disappearance by snatching a cloth from a side table and hurrying yourself to the bathroom, flicking on the overhead lights. In the livid glow your burn looks at sickly as you do; you almost begin to think it'll darken before your eyes, or pale until it's the same pallor as his flesh. How even  _should_  you treat someone of his state, his calibre - the ghost who doesn't think he's a ghost?  
  
You drag your fingers under your eyes, pushing in skin with your thumbs. Your hands buckle down against the sink and you watch yourself  _disintegrating_ , crumbling on mould-dark tiles. And then you're in tears, wondering why it's a  _relief_ , wondering why you haven't stopped listening to the spilling of your heart. You wonder how it is that you forget to expect his presence.

You wonder how it is that Arthur - after all his misery, his intensity, his  _gall_ , can find you and envelop you and that you permit it to happen.  
  
"Dear heart," he calls to you, and then: "Oh, fuck it. Fuck it all. Haven't I done this?"  
  
The cold is in your throat, in your brain. In the moments you have, it's impossible to tell whether freezing to death is meant to be peaceful. In the least, the comfort offered as you lean against him is enough to deceive you. How little it's possible to reconcile when you know he's the root of every evil you've known in weeks - every struggle and stutter, every second of resentment and self-loathing. You'd wish the same thing upon him a dozen times over. Does he, whose shoulder meets your chin, know the temperature emanating from him would be enough to kill you, or in the least boil your skin? Has he seen the burn?   
  
What power do you retain - what might you do, now, to repel him?  
  
You cry into him,  _through_  him, with the knowledge that he may as well not be there at all, for all the good his hands or your tears do. Only afterwards do you change. Only afterwards (quieted, and with most of your feelings concealed) do you tell yourself that, to anyone else, you’d appear  _pathetic_. You would seem to them to in shambles, crying into nothing.  
  
"No,  _no_." Arthur retreats the same second you do and you stagger, almost mechanically steered apart. Without death there would be nothing, not even a passing word to bind  _anything_  to  _anyone_. "You know it's all because of  _you_. I've told you the same thing a hundred times—"  
  
"And I've heard you, a hundred times."  
  
"And what do you make of it?"  
  
"It's surprising how much you pick up in a short space of time," he replies dryly. It's almost more honest than you'd like. "Poor little thing. Fancy seeing me  _shot_."  
  
"Why do you keep saying that?"  
  
"What do you want me to say?"  
  
Nothing is as taunting as possibility, your mind reiterates. Arthur's still speaking when you look up, with the sort of look that could either be perfectly real or perfectly artificial, with few possibilities in between. You figure he'd be turning your chin toward him if there was even the slightest chance of him seeming corporeal, of his touch  _meaning_  something.  
  
"You shouldn't be able to see me," you manage, staring ahead. "None of this feels real. There's no way you could heal or repair yourself. There's no way, is there? How are you  _here_?"  
  
"Technically, I shouldn't be. But I  _do_ , I  _can_." For a brief second, his talk is intoxicating,  _persuasive_. "There's enough humanity left in me, I suppose, to see you and know you.” Expression at first critical, he seems to soften if only for your sake.

He still hasn't seen the burn.  
  
Acting against your better judgement, you allow him to sleep at your side, the companion from the dead, skin against skin. You allow his fingers to wander the length of your forearm as you fall asleep, and you gasp at the feeling of the sheets against the your burn, and you ask yourself again and again until you've nothing left: how it is that you've been so  _reduced_? Would anyone believe you were the same person you were before Arthur was killed?  
  
Your will and energy, you realise, has been squandered on someone of whom you know and understand essentially  _nothing_. But he's good with his words, ever so good.  _Better to stray from the living_ , he says.  _A waste of time and nothing else. Stay here._  It takes less than an hour before you believe it.  
  
Afterwards, you lose track of the time that passes. All you know is that it's you and him against a vacant world.  
  
\--  
  
You keep forgetting you're not supposed to offer him coffee in the mornings. But in a curious way, you've come to be more receptive in other ways, as well as more lenient towards being patronised. You’ve come to understand his behaviour far better over weeks of being detached from reality, so that you no longer balk to find he's spent seven hours of the night combing your bookshelves, or sorting your cutlery, or a dozen other pointless, repetitive tasks.

Whether or not he sleeps and eats isn't necessary. As your sole companion, you extend a level of acceptance toward him, and expect gratitude in return; he gives it through encouraging you, step by step, to adapt to the cold, and you sometimes allow him to touch your shoulders, your scalp - to have his fingers rest at the crook of your elbow. You can't pick fault with it - you have no need. Why forsake the familiar, after all?   
  
What once decorated the edges of your conscience is now the golden centrepiece, radiant and benevolent. He is almost the only thing you need to survive.  
  
At times, he even seems to become  _material_ , to wear a different cloak; he fools around with attempts to mend your heater and intermittently, he brings your mail to you in the mornings. There's less than there used to be, however - you swear, too, that you see the usual authoritative script on some of them, begging your return to real life, only for them to never be seen again. Those which are hand-written he gives to you himself, staring at you long and hard; it takes a while for them to get into your hands. You sleep in late and when you wake up, Arthur's cradling your hands.  
  
But you don't mind. You trust that he must somehow retain the ability to see what happens around him, although he hasn't changed a bit in the space of  _months_.   
  
Responsibility, for you, doesn't bear the same urgency it used to; there's nothing in your thoughts or words left to make you to believe you aren't doing enough to keep yourself alive. Rather, the ghost takes it upon his shoulders, and minds all things in your stead, maintained by the trust you've been all too keen to allocate. The word  _disparity_ , with regard to how greatly you've thinned and tired in the last few months, hasn't occurred to you. What are bony hands and bad sleep and a staggering walk in comparison to companionship? Why waste contentment over such fragile misgivings?  
  
You speak to him, usually, of idle things, most of which are more to his memory's concern than yours.   
  
"I went to see my family," he says to you one morning; you shudder halfway through attempting to swallow a bite of food. "Or rather, I tried."  
  
As per routine, you weave it into conversation. "Where do you live?" For a second you think he'll be so maudlin as to say  _here._  
  
"Three hours, give or take." Thank God.   
  
"By car?"  
  
"By train," he finishes. "I couldn't afford a car."  
  
There's no way for you to explain why your heart pounds just a little faster, why your mind at first accepts the reply and then turns it over until it's thoroughly soured. "How...?"  
  
"When you were asleep. It's not too far, really. That was the day I was gone."  
  
"Yes, when you left me alone," you say, but already he's perfectly fit to continue his insubstantial spiel.   
  
"Would you believe it, even! Would you believe it - not a photograph of anyone in that house for twenty bloody years, and then I see myself on the mantelpiece! Awful photo, but there I was.  _There I was_. I walk right through them and I say their names, and all they do is ask why there's a draught." Shaking his head, leaning back in his chair, his hands search frantically for something with which his fingers can be distracted. You stare at his eye sockets blankly.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"God, of course you are. But it doesn't really matter, you know. I always knew it was bound to happen - a bit of flimsy remembrance, and it's all over. It won’t change for me.”  
  
"Do you wish it had?" Studying your old burn, even now gleaming under the light, your mind sputters to life, and it churns everything over.   
  
Arthur reaches across to play with the tines of your fork. Is it one of his material moments, you think, or is it all a misconception? Or perhaps - perhaps has he all along been fully verifiable and  _real_  and you've glanced it all over, reimagining it to your own standards?  
  
"Yes," he finally admits. "It's stupid, but I probably do. I thought dead things were meant to stay dead. It's what sounds right. It's what  _should_  be."  
  
"So what about you? Are you an exception? What if you're the only ghost in the world?"  
  
"Then I probably deserve it, don’t I? There’s got to be  _some_  reason. But you - you would soothe the dead." He faintly smiles, and the room's atmosphere deepens and drops drastically in temperature, but without your knowing, you've let something else into your blood; you pull yourself away and gather your cutlery and force yourself upright. For all you’ve convinced yourself you love him - in whatever form it comes - you're distracted. You crave a stillness you realise you don't truly have. What you continue to struggle to understand, additionally, is where the difficulties still lie, and whether they remain in you, or in  _him_ , or otherwise in something unknown.   
  
It isn't like him to be an inhibition, not now. You're pleased enough just to make him happy, as happy as books and study and disagreements and pianos and pears do. What you cannot bear is the  _obligation_.  
  
\--  
  
Still you welcome him back to your side as time passes, believing it'll do you good. He possesses a remarkable inability to make you feel sorry for him. You might not want to be, but in a roundabout sort of way, the same emotions wind up on your door, unwelcome passengers in your thoughts. It doesn't help that he's very capable of pleasing those around him if he sets his mind to the task (you think, sometimes, about how things would be if you weren't the only companion for him - if somehow he could walk at someone else’s side and be revered just as much as he craves. What life would be like if you both didn't create your own stigma, and write your own laws, and seclude yourselves).   
  
Again, it comes back to you - the allure of  _possibility_. Of different paths, written across different sands.   
  
It doesn't help that it's so hard to watch a ghost mourn. While he has continued his efforts to acquaint himself with fact, you see the brief shifts in the face as he lays hands to his own skin, knowing something is  _there_  but sensing emptiness, all the same. At first, you can’t even tell whether it  _is_  grief - is he capable of it?   
  
You picture your life as a sort of interval, now: an  _intermission_ , you tell yourself one day, and laugh with something almost perfectly genuine. What lies before has been forgotten, and while you cannot predict what will unfold in future, you understand already that you haven’t entered a fresh stage. Not yet.   
  
Voices alone cannot feed you forever; it’s a miracle his voice has lasted as long as it has in terms of its use, for it does not beguile you as much as it once did. For all the hours spent at one another's side, for all the attempts at clarity and the reading and the talking and whatever else has been jammed between your past life and the life to come, he is  _startlingly_  imperfect.  
  
"He's dead," you one day find yourself saying to your mirror, worrying at the state of your skin, and the misery in your eyes that you've never fully medicated away. It's a promise of reality formed out of nothing, and you cannot say from where it comes, but you like how it sounds. "He's dead. Dead." You run savagely-bitten nails along the edges of your lips and reach for a facecloth, rinsing it out, wiping down your face to wake yourself up. "Dead." Wetting it again, you cough and think of how recently it was that you stood at this place in tears - how pathetic, how regrettable! You won't make the same mistake again. "Gone, dead. Shot through the eyes. He can see me - I don't know how. But he can."   
  
You start to think he's listening (although you don't know if you're right, really - did it ever go through the skull, or did he bleed to death?). Shouldn't he have the right to hear, the right to know?  
  
"He cannot touch me. He's dead." You'll never why it is that you're laughing, now, and you watch your features bring back to life. "He's  _dead_."  
  
\--  
  
"Why won't you talk to me?"  
  
"I'm tired," you reply. "Isn't that enough?"  
  
From the corners of your eyes, you know he's looking on - seemingly entranced by your glass of water, which you've been periodically refilling for hours.   
  
"You don't drink," he says.  
  
Your eyes narrow. "Yes, I do."  
  
"Not the sort of drink I'm thinking of, you don't."  
  
"Oh, right." You glance at your water indulgently. "In that case, no, I don't."  
  
"God knows why," Arthur responds. “I miss it. I’m not immune to cravings, even now. "What do  _you_  crave?"  
  
"Air," you answer. "Just enough to live."  
  
"You’re not happy?"  
  
"No, I’m not. You’re wrong about me. About a lot of things."  
  
"Of course," he says, softly and without evident threat, yet it tips you over the brink.  
  
"I'm sorry to tell you I need more than a ghost's feeble comforts to keep myself alive," you bite out, and although the feeling is utterly worth relishing, you remain in the realm of doubt. Have you overdone it? Does he believe you have? Does it  _matter_? "Sorry if that's hard for you to hear."  
  
"I wasn't trying to insult you," says Arthur.  
  
"Intention doesn't always matter."  
  
"I think it should."  
  
"I don’t." You want him to take you seriously and see you  _equal_ , speaking from a stance as credible as his. "But I'm not so sure I can remember the last time you asked me what I thought."  
  
Declining into condescension, you barely hear him speak. "This doesn't have to happen."  
  
"It already has." Yet in your haste to rise, you falter; half a metre from your arm your glass slips and shatters across your feet, staining it. Arthur's gone by the time you glance upward so you alone traverse the glass, swearing off your head as you dive for the cupboard, desperate to know why he couldn't have  _remained_ , could not have bothered to help you as he always says he does. But he isn't here, so you pick glass from your skin and move on. You’re fumbling about in the cupboard when a dozen bundles fall at your feet.   
  
As you scramble to catch them all, you wonder why they're so yellowed; they're stained with ink. You understand only as you lift them to the light: they're  _newspapers_ ; the one in your hands is dated three months old, and sections of it are haphazardly crossed out. The section where the weddings and obituaries usually go has been torn out.   
  
Trying not to breathe too hard, listening out for the creak of your knees, you peer around the corner. He's gone, and your burn is stinging.  
  
You're aware now of having some time to yourself, so you gather the newspapers and shove them all back in the cupboard, flinching at the noise it all creates. For an instant, a bare instant, you forget  _everything_  - the argument, the water, the blood. The shooting.   _Arthur_. What's the most glaring thing about it is that your heart lifts in your chest as they go, one by one.  
  
\--  
  
For once you're thankful you've slipped back into sleeplessness, for since the moment the idea occurred to you, you haven't been able to pull yourself away from the newspapers, now stacked here and there or wherever they can afford to be. Before you go to sleep, you're delighted in knowing you're scrubbing your hands of ink, not of blood; the only things which keep swimming before your eyes are letters and images and dates, not gristle. You doubt you'll ever forget the date he first met you:  _April 14th._ They could not have buried him long afterwards.   
  
The newspapers divulge more than ever you foresaw. There’s evidence of shorn and damaged pages, places where it seems uncannily unusual his name doesn't appear more than once, and places where ink fresher than that used for printing is smeared. Although you haven't done yourself or him the kindness of empathising, you understand better now than ever:  _his denial will be the end of him_. When hasn't he corrected his title, resented the supernatural attributes you've bestowed? Every aspect of his recent life is forged from  _denial_ , and you dare to think it's poisoning the marrow of his bones. It's not enough to live on.  
  
After three steady nights of sleepless deception, you've memorised the names of every cemetery within five hours' distance. On the fifth night, red-eyed, _you find it_ : an obscure little graveyard on the edge of a moor, where half a dozen other distant ancestors are buried, according to the weak obituary you found a day ago. You can calculate a route - you can find where to walk and go the narrow way, where he cannot track you. You'll cross every road, change every bus. Yet then - what comes after?  
  
"What are you doing?"  
  
He catches you midway through questioning your own ambition, yet it doesn’t intimidate you now. "Reading.”

“What about?”  
  
With Arthur soundlessly moving about behind you, you hurriedly stack your piles of evidence, folding out dog-eared corners and pointlessly attempting to amend the tears at the sides.   
  
"They're very old newspapers. They couldn't possibly be useful." Materialising at your side, his fingers lunge forwards for the paper's headline; you slam down your forearm before him and cherish the growingly familiar surge igniting you. It'll both begin and end with him, you know now; the stain will soon be gone from you, the blood washed away! No more nightmares, no more dead eyes that believe they're making you well!  
  
"They are, actually. I’m doing the crosswords." Arthur steps back. For the first time, you take note of the long, rigid limbs.   
  
"You're going somewhere, aren't you?" You nod, not sure what else to do. "I'll accompany you."  
  
Your heart  _stops_  - but your mind carries on. "Alright."  
  
"When?"   
  
"In half an hour," you oblige, witness first to the crumbling of your hopes and then to their swift rebuilding as your thoughts gather. "It's a while away. I hope you won't mind."  
  
"Well, what's the worst that could happen? We'll not get lost, will we?"  
  
"We won't," you say back, nearly cradling the documents, now. Truly enough, perhaps it is better this way - there's something to be said of letting a dead man see his grave.   
  
Smiling to yourself, you are indifferent to the hand which fleetingly touches your cheekbone; he departs a moment after. What he understands as a beginning will be the flourish of the end.  
  
\--  
  
In spite of him, almost, you keep to your original plan. You walk the same deserted roads that you envisaged, keep as much to yourself as possible, and speak astonishingly little; you swap buses as frequently as you can without derailing your intentions.

You fight with yourself to recall when last you felt the air as you do now, which says all too much about how restrained you've been over the months you’ve spent detached from society. You want to run and hide and live your life all over again and do a thousand unachievable things. But you don’t have to let them go; it’s not so simple, now, just to desert them and form other ideas, all because you believe there's nothing else left for you.  
  
In regard to him, there's still some lasting moments of a weak affection that continues to show: he stands beside you on public transport for convenience's sake, and wakes you after you accidentally fall asleep, with such a tender sort of consideration that you think you’d be all too easily coerced back toward guilt if you weren’t dancing upon the threshold of real, wonderful  _change_.

To throw that away now would be such a waste that you think it'd haunt you more than he  _ever_  has.  
  
You do your best to remould your thinking, as well as anyone with your recent experiences is able, and bring him nearer to the scaffold.   
  
"Pretty roads," he's saying to you. "You'll look at  _them_."  
  
"People will stare if I talk," you answer under your breath, kicking at the patches of flowers which gild the roadsides. Already, you can’t help but feel crushed beneath the pressure of your seclusion, and panic at your sudden re-emergence.  
  
Your ghost keeps by your side every step, as you draw nearer and nearer; you're alarmed by how little he shows and suspects, for nothing is said even as the little cemetery looms, and your heart thrashes. Every moment is more conflicting than the last. His hand goes to your side and you're sure, for a moment, you  _feel_  him - true flesh and true bone! His face is turned to the birds on the path as yours rejects him, all in favour of crumbling marble. He says nothing until your deliberate stop before the cemetery’s gate.

Your words are his undoing.  
  
"We're here."  
  
You feel yourself nearing a terrible abyss, the brink of heartbreak. He throws himself back from you, almost in disgust, and draws a rattling breath.  
  
"So we are," he exhales, "and how  _clever_  of you to bring me here."  
  
Unable to bear looking at him, you begin to move amongst the graves, feeling the natural cool of the stones, pausing only to compose yourself. "You chose to come with me, Arthur. You can't prove anything."  
  
" I know they buried me here. So much time spent  _poring_  over newspapers looking for my burial place, eh? That’s what all that was for? I knew I should’ve tried harder. I didn’t do enough to stop you."  
  
You don’t recognise the implication behind his words until much later, but for the time being, his voice completely ceases to be a comfort – it is an  _abomination_. "You didn't once think of visiting your own grave?"  
  
"Why would I? I've found where I belong. You welcomed me."  
  
Your head whips back; you rub your hands against each other, restless, trembling,  _furious_. Oddly, you note that as the wind gusts down, his clothing billows at his wrists and ankles; you’ve never seen that happen before. "You don't belong with me! You never did. It was pity and nothing else."  
  
" _I_  did more than simply feel sorry for you. I needed someone to care for, didn't I? How do you suppose all this has been for  _me_?"  
  
"I could never afford your kind of freedom."  
  
"Of course, clearly being murdered only freed me up, didn’t it?" he answers back. When you hear the scuff of footsteps behind you, you pass it off as fantasy unworthy of thought.  
  
"I'm here because I want proof, Arthur. I want to  _see_  you're dead. I want to know that I didn’t go mad.”  
  
"So what are you expecting -for my body to take me  _back_?"  
  
"Perhaps," you murmur, careful to sweep your eyes over the three-hundred-year-old graves, combing for the new. While previously the low winds were revitalising, they abruptly begin to carry a smell pungent enough to throw your stomach into disarray. You cough. "It's only after seeing a ghost in my house that my views have—"  
  
As the smell increases in potency you’re forced to stop, breathing hard through your mouth. You entertain vague thoughts of mass burials and plague corpses, swathed in white.   
  
Concerned only with himself, Arthur continues, and you hear footsteps slipping in the mud, now, and a voice which seems to wring out your innards. It sounds choked, pained, reedy. "I suppose you haven't seen a  _scrap_  of humanity in me ever since I died in front of you."  
  
"How long will you keep believing that the gunshot was just a little firework going off? Sometimes I wonder if you even  _know_ —"  
  
"I do, thank you very much. It's a bit hard to overlook losing as much as I did."  
  
"It's hardly hindered you all that much. But you are what you are, and you've got an eternity to work that out, Arthur."  
  
"Enjoying yourself?" he demands, near to savage in tone. There's no telling how hurt he actually is, but you do all you can to repress your pity, regardless. You've given up on granting it so liberally, so  _nonchalantly_. "Fuck, you'd think, you'd honestly think—"  
  
"What about me? You never let me out of your  _sight_ , and for what?" Finished with the plaques, you go toward where the headstones are gathered. You feel peculiar as you do, and your head spins - if he was so low on funds, how could his relatives have succeeded in affording the grandeur of a decent marker? "I can see things better now. So much better, so well I know you for what you are."  
  
"I did it because I knew the state you—"  
  
"Yes, all since I'd seen you die in front of me!" At once the memories return, and you're bowed under them, thrashing. Arthur, blond and ordinary – Arthur, at the wrong place at the wrong time. Arthur, who you're loathing with all your being, lost somewhere in the haze of rot. Why can't you turn back? "You've effectively ruined my life. I can't—I don't... How am I to climb up from here, then?  _How_? Society won't recognise me, and I... what can I do to compete with that?"  
  
"I didn't mean—"  
  
"I don't care what you meant. You kept me under goddamn house arrest, and I'm only realising it now."   
  
And you go to face him, but he's not even  _Arthur,_ now - he's festering in front of you, he's falling apart, his lips are pitiful and there's blood under the arms and chin and you can see bone stabbing through, you can see an almost bare, almond-white scalp and missing nails and oh, God, the  _fumes_ , you think you'll crumple where you are—  
  
The corpse, your  _ghost_ , reduced to what he truly is, is souring the grass with elbows in the dirt, and through all the conceit, you hear his voice recover a strange gentleness.  
  
You don't even have the fortitude to ask  _why_. This, you know, is what he is.  _Who_  he is.  
  
"I'm sorry if I've hurt you. I truly am."  
  
"Arthur."   
  
Yet you're too human for your own good; you cannot bear the  _sight_  of him, let alone the notion of touch. You keep your distance.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
"So am I," he says, voice nearly gone. "Is this the end, dear heart?"  
  
"Yes, I think it is."  
  
"What a pity. I think I could've loved you."  
  
"It wasn't right."   
  
For a moment, you think he might be laughing.  
  
As you take your first step forward, you realise you've come right before his grave; by the time you've read the inscription once, then thrice, then a dozen times in succession, you're inconsolable.   
  
If the cemetery has done so much to him, can he change back? Or is this conclusion, proper or not, his final,  _irreversible_  deliverance?  
  
At once fully, yet  _terrifyingly_  real before your eyes, you acquiesce enough to let him hold your hand, but then, you're gone. You wait three minutes for the next bus and ride it alone.  
  
You can’t bear to look back, yet as you turn the corner and round the cemetery, you could swear he disappears right before your eyes. And after what seems years, you feel  _warm_.


End file.
